How Xenforo 2.2 new SEO settings could optimize our forums?

[Max Fridman]

With Xenforo 2.2 release, we have now more options for fine-tune our SEO settings you can find the details here:

XF 2.2 - Search forums, SEO improvements and dev team news

A new way to surface content Forums are usually devoted to a single subject matter and the threads they contain relate to that subject matter, unless it's all gone wrong and your users are wandering off topic. Threads belong to their parent forums, so if your board separates posts about kittens...

xenforo.com

For example removing from Google threads without answers or our oldest threads? Whats your opinion about this?

"Removing" something from Google Search can improve our SEO rankings overall or is a loss/loss situation? And you will apply this changes for your community eventually? Let me know

 

[Anatoliy]

removing from Google ... our oldest threads?

I can see in G search console that top landing pages from G search are 10 years old threads.
So I don't think that it's a good idea.

threads without answers

those probably do harm rather than help, and some time ago I deleted them. However today I would merge them instead.

 

[arn]

Google Explains Which Pages Should be Removed

Google's John Mueller on how to identify pages to block. Then he explains why some low traffic pages are okay.

www.searchenginejournal.com

This article is relevant in that google does seem to advocate no indexing what’s considered low quality pages.

 

[Alpha1]

The problem is that xenforo has no way to distinguish between a high quality thread and a low quality thread. We can guess that a thread with low post count may be bad quality. We dont know if there is one word or 1000 words in that post. Or we can guess that a thread with negative ratings on the first post may be bad quality. But in fact some of our best threads start out with a bad post, getting stellar responses.

I think that it has great potential but will require custom development to make it work effectively.

 

[Max Fridman]

Outdated threads seems something we as forum managers should look into. I dont know if Reddit for example after 5 years remove from the indexing their topics.

One thing that they do is "Archive" 6 months old threads.